Highlights & Takeaways from CFS: A Frontline Perspective on Sustainable Fashion

After having dreamt of it for years, I went to Copenhagen Fashion Summit as a volunteer in May 2019. Luckily, I was assigned the best job I could have imagined: I was a seater for around 200 VIP along with 2 other seaters. This is how I got to listen to almost all talks, panel discussions, bs, insights and inspiration.

Copenhagen Fashion Summit enabled me to not only meet forward-thinking, woke business people and activists, but also made me hopeful for this - let's be honest - dirty industry. To let you benefit from my experience, here is a quick summary:

Fashion is full of pretty words and BS

Having studied and worked in sustainability in business and/or fashion for the past 5 years, I am able to tell whether businesses genuinely care for the environment and society or greenwash their image. Which is both, amazing and devastating. It's amazing because I can tell whom to believe the efforts they talk about are genuine. It's devastating because the ones talking about their amazing initiatives to save the environment and the people while making good business outweigh the real positive disruptors by far. However, in order to make the best of my BS filtering-gift, I want to bring more awareness to the conflict of profit and responsible business.

Politicians take fashion and/or the planet more seriously, but it's not enough

Among the speakers there were some politicians, which shows that not only this fashion summit opens up to non-fashion decision-makers. It also shows how politics cares about making fashion cleaner and more just. Let me elaborate a little on the latter: There were French and Danish politicans as well as some from the EU commission. During their talks, I had to find out that most of their talks about green and social businesses were more of a fig-leaf. None of them were - no offence - high-profile enough to make a change. None of them had a real clue about the mechanisms within the fashion industry, let alone its inherent issues or an idea of possible solutions. Maybe this calls for the fashion industry to collaborate more with pollitics. However, maybe this shows politics' level of awareness for human rights issues and environmental problems within, or should I say inherent in, the fashion industry.

Fashion acknowledges climate crisis

At the summit, I heard almost every speaker talk about climate change. (Thank you, Fridays for Future!) This might sound obvious, but in fashion, nothing really is obvious, especially admitting truths that are not pretty. One might critisise them for using very soft wording for a very hard truth (climate change instead of climate crisis), but let's not be a nitpicker.

Below, watch a video summary of CFS through my eyes: